Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) devices, such as disk drives and Flash drives, communicate with a host using the SATA protocol. To implement a large read command, the SATA device typically transmits the requested data to the host in multiple blocks (e.g., 8 k blocks). The prior art has suggested to insert a delay between each block transfer to allow the host to send intra-command data to the SATA device. However, inserting a delay between each block transfer can significantly degrade the performance (throughput) of the SATA device.